The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

Wit and ingenuity are also manifestations of the facultv of judgment; in the former its activity is reflective, in the latter subsuming. In most men the faculty of judgment is only nominally present ; it is a kind of irony that it is reckoned with the normal faculties of the mind, instead of being only attributed to the monstris per excessum. Ordinary men show even in the smallest affairs want of confidence in their own judgment, just because they know from experience that it is of no service. With them prejudice and imitation take its place ; and thus they are kept in a state of continual non-age, from which scarcely one in many hundreds is delivered. Certainly this is not avowed, for even to themselves they appear to judge ; but all the time they are glancing stealthily at the opinion of others.

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which is their secret standard. While each one would be ashamed to go about in a borrowed coat, hat, or mantle, they all have nothing but borrowed opinions, which they eagerly collect wherever they can find them, and then strut about giving them out as their own. Others borrow them again from them and do the same thing. This explains the rapid and wide spread of errors, and also the fame of what is bad; for the professional purveyors of opinion, such as journalists and the like, give as a rule only false wares, as those who hire out masquerading dresses give only false jewels.

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CHAPTER VIIL»

ON THE THEORY OF THE LUDICBOUS.

My theory of the ludicrous also depends upon the opposition explained in the preceding chapters between perceptible and abstract ideas, which I have brought into such marked prominence. Therefore what has still to be said in explanation of this theory finds its proper place here, although according to the order of the text it would have to come later.

The problem of the origin, which is everywhere the same, and hence of the peculiar significance of laughter, was already known to Cicero, but only to be at once dismissed as insoluble {Be Orat., ii. 58). The oldest attempt known to me at a psychological explanation of laughter is to be found in Hutcheson's "Introduction into Moral Philosophy," Bk. I., ch. i. § 14. A somewhat later anonymous work, " Traiti des Causes Physiques ei Morals du Eire," 1 768, is not without merit as a ventilation of the subject. Platner, in his "Anthropology," § 894, has collected the opinions of the philosophers from Home to Kant who have attempted an explanation of this phenomenon peculiar to human nature. Kant's and Jean Paul's theories of the ludicrous are well known. I regard it as unnecessary to prove their incorrectness, for whoever tries to refer given cases of the ludicrous to them will in the great majority of instances be at once convinced of their insufficiency.

According to my explanation given in the first volume x This chapter is connected with § 13 of the first volume.

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the source of the ludicrous is always the paradoxical, and therefore unexpected, subsumption of an object under a conception which in other respects is different from it, and accordingly the phenomenon of laughter always signifies the sudden apprehension of an incongruity between such a conception and the real object thought under it, thus between the abstract and the concrete object of perception.

The greater and more unexpected, in the apprehension of the laugher, this incongruity is, the more violent will be his laughter.

Therefore in everything that excites laughter it must always be possible to show a conception and a particular, that is, a • thing or event, which certainly can be subsumed under that conception, and therefore thought through it, yet in another and more predominating aspect does not belong to it at all, but is strikingly different from everything else that is thought through that conception.

If, as often occurs, especially in witticisms, instead of such a real object of perception, the conception of a subordinate species is brought under the higher conception of the genus, it will yet excite laughter only through the fact that the imagination realises it, i.e., makes a perceptible representative stand for it, and thus the conflict between what is thought and what is perceived takes place.

Indeed if we wish to understand this perfectly explicitly, it is possible to trace everything ludicrous to a syllogism in the first figure, with an undisputed major and an unexpected minor, which to a certain extent is only sophistically valid, in consequence of which connection the conclusion partakes of the quality of the ludicrous.